Spinoza Lecture: Beyond the "archic" Principle

Alternative or Dilemma?

Catherine Malabou will hold the Spinoza Chair of the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities in the second term of the academic year 2018-2019 and will be delivering the accompanying two Spinoza Lectures on 'Philosophy and Anarchy'.

Malabou's first Spinoza Lecture is entitled ‘Beyond the "archic" Principle: Alternative or Dilemma?'

In contemporary Western philosophy, destruction or deconstruction of metaphysics has been presented by prominent thinkers like Levinas, Derrida or Schürmann as the liberation of an an-archic way of thinking. The possibility of questioning and acting beyond the «arkhè», beyond the principle (commandment and beginning at the same time), has opened new perspectives in ontology and ethics. Levinas, for example, characterizes the relation to the Other in terms of «an-archic responsibility». Interestingly, such an ontological and ethical anarchy has always been strictly distinguished from political anarchism. Can we envisage a confrontation between the two traditions? Is "post anarchism" a satisfactory way of setting it up?

About Catherine Malabou

Catherine Malabou is professor of philosophy at the Centre for research In Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University and distinguished professor of Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies at the University of California at Irvine. She studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure of Fontenay-St Cloud (France) and the University of Paris-Sorbonne. She has held numerous visiting chairs in the US (Berkeley, Buffalo, Madison, The New School). In 2015, she gave the Wellek Lectures at UC Irvine, and in 2017 the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton.

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